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Wednesday, Nov 25, 2009
Gus Van Sant takes on Kurt Cobain. Plus: A rowdy Berlin adventure for the anti-globalization crowd and a devastating Chechen war documentary.
Jul 21, 2005 | In the early days of this column, I broached a half-baked theory that arty indie films pretty much fell into one of two categories, those being Jim Jarmusch and David Lynch. Most readers treated this hypothesis with all the gravity and respect it had earned (i.e., none), but a few of you admitted that I had blundered, perhaps accidentally, upon a categorical distinction.
Gus Van Sant may represent the precise middle point between those two poles; he's got the calculated strangeness and sometimes the formal obscurantism of Lynch, mixed with the drifty, middle-distance chilliness of Jarmusch. Maybe that's why I've never liked him. No, that's not totally fair. I've never quite gotten Van Sant's movies, even the allegedly important ones like "Drugstore Cowboy" or "My Own Private Idaho," because they seem so profoundly passionless (something I've never felt about Jarmusch or Lynch).
Van Sant wants to portray characters who are emotionally isolated, ambivalent to their surroundings, unsure whether they want to live or die. Great. But Shakespeare didn't convey Hamlet's existential angst by writing a murky, mumbly mood piece that never goes anywhere. In the guise of portraying disaffection, Van Sant made movies with no affect whatever -- and a small but devoted art-damaged '90s audience ate them up.
As tough as it is to revise a cherished opinion, I have to give Van Sant a shout for the willfully difficult work he has done since decamping from Hollywood (after the schmaltz-fests of "Good Will Hunting" and "Finding Forrester"). I didn't much enjoy either "Gerry," his two-hander with Casey Affleck and Matt Damon lost in the desert, or "Elephant," his quasi-documentary, quasi-Columbine drama, but in both cases the craft, economy and formal complexity were impressive.
"Last Days," Van Sant's much-anticipated new film that's more or less about the death of Kurt Cobain, is the crowning achievement of Van Sant's return to the art house. Again, I can't really say I liked it; it's a supremely unfriendly picture that doesn't so much shed light on Cobain's epoch-making suicide as enclose it in a cone of darkness. But in its almost sadistic level of realism, and its refusal to pander to any imaginable audience, it's a work of high integrity.
I could complain that Gus Van Sant is a borderline celebrity in the film world, while Finnish director Pirjo Honkasalo, a superior artist in every respect, is barely known outside arty European circles. (She certainly wasn't known to me until very recently.) But that's pretty dumb: Fame doesn't guarantee talent, and vice versa! Wah wah wah! The real point is that if you get a chance to see Honkasalo's new film "The 3 Rooms of Melancholia" -- and you can get past that lugubrious title -- please don't pass it up. Yes, it's a documentary, and yes, it's about the Chechen war, but those facts are fundamentally inadequate. It's a beautiful, moving, mysterious film, and genres can't hold it.
In this busy summer season -- while the studios are cranking out their worst medium-budget crap in July and August, some of the most ambitious stuff appears on the margins -- we've also got an exciting low-budget political thriller for the anti-globalization crowd, an engaging documentary about a pioneer environmentalist and a horror movie so disgusting and amoral that even I had qualms about it. See them all immediately.
